Received an email this week from Richard Madison, Marketing Executive of the Brighton School of Business & Management (you’ll find his courses introduced via this link) concerning a nice infographic he’s produced: ‘A comprehensive guide to choosing an online course’.
Now I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t offer a (hopefully constructive!) critique, and you’ll find it underneath the infographic:
If you’ve got this far, it probably means that you found the infographic at least quite interesting. I agree, and would like to add the following comments:
- the title: delete ‘comprehensive’ – it isn’t, so either just get rid of it or use ‘brief’;
- change the order of the criteria to make it more logical for a novice online learner – ‘Integrity’ shouldn’t be first – order might be better as ‘Course Content & Format’, ‘Teaching Experience’, ‘Class Size’, ‘Quality’, ‘Integrity’ and ‘Ratings & Reviews’;
- under ‘Quality’, suggest they check for any quality assurance undertaken by appropriate authorities (especially government quality agencies);
- under ‘Course Content & Format’, suggest they check the level of the course, along with any pre-requisites or co-requisites;
- ‘Pros’ and ‘Cons’ – for the pros of online learning and cons of the classroom, add the notion of place – you can be anywhere to study online, but must go to a specific location for a class; and
- ‘Online Cons’ and ‘Classroom Pros’ – there seems to be a message that classroom interaction is superior, and this is clearly not necessarily the case – it can be difficult to interact in a class (especially if you are a minority, e.g. a mature student in a classroom of undergraduates) and it is not necessarily difficult to form real connection with online peers.
That’s it – enough from me. Again, nice work Richard.